Adventures in Condensed Milk: How to Make Vietnamese Coffee and Vietnamese Yogurt

When the French came to Vietnam, they lugged with them their culinary traditions, among them coffee and yogurt. Before driving the French out in 1954, the Vietnamese spent 80 years selectively integrating French techniques and ingredients into their cuisine, adopting what appealed, adapting what didn’t. In a tropical climate, condensed milk is easier to obtain and store than fresh milk.

When the Vietnamese came to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the ’70s and ’80s, they brought with them a little Saigon and un petit peu de Paris.

Vietnamese Coffee (cà phê)
Dart into a Vietnamese restaurant along Eat Street in Minneapolis (Hien Deli or Phở Tàu Bay) or University Avenue in St. Paul (Saigon Restaurant & Bakery) to enjoy a Vietnamese filtered coffee (cà phê): black or sweetened (đen or sữa); hot or iced (nóng or đá). Nothing feels more civilized and contemplative than watching the black coffee drip through the stainless steel phin filter into the sludge of condensed milk pooled at the bottom of your glass. Try as you might, you cannot hurry it, although some Vietnamese restaurants such as Quang Restaurant in Minneapolis and Trung Nam Bakery in St. Paul have tried to short-circuit it by delivering their coffee in a plastic cup, already stirred, iced, and pierced with a straw. Either way, the result will be bold, sweet, and smooth.

To invite a little Saigon into your own kitchen, all you’d need is a stop at one of the many Asian groceries in Minneapolis-St. Paul to outfit yourself with a phin filter, sweetened condensed milk, coffee, and the directions below.

According to Vietnamese coffee exporter Trung Nguyen’s website, Longevity, the preferred Vietnamese brand of sweetened condensed milk, “is made with more milk added for extra creaminess, and as a result, lightens coffee much better than Carnation or other brands available in America. Most brands sold in America now are including vegetable oils or thickeners to save money, but Longevity is 100% whole milk and sugar.”

The Heavy Table compared three brands of condensed milk alongside Longevity: two brands commonly available in American supermarkets, Borden’s Eagle and Nestle’s Carnation, and another brand commonly found in Asian Markets, Black & White, and found them nearly identical in ingredients (milk and sugar), calories (130 for 2 tablespoons), and nutritional content. We left a fourth brand, Parrot, behind on the shelves, as it contained soybean oil and other additives.

We were surprised to find the Longevity and Black & White brands chalkier (with Longevity being the chalkiest), while Eagle and Carnation were sweeter and more viscous (with Eagle being the sweetest and most pudding-like). On its own, we preferred Eagle. However, in Vietnamese coffee, it seemed too sweet. Longevity was our favorite in coffee.

Phin filters / brewers will run you $4-$5 at an Asian Grocery: in St. Paul at Shuang Hur or in Minneapolis at United Noodles Oriental Foods or Truong Thanh Grocery Store. The phin filter most commonly available in Minneapolis-St. Paul is made in Taiwan and has a screw-down-style screen (as opposed to the gravity-style screen traditionally found in Vietnam and used in the photos for this story), but both work essentially the same way. The phin has three components: a chamber, a screen or filter, and a cap that cleverly doubles as a saucer to prevent the chamber from pooling water and grounds on your table after the brewing is complete.

For the coffee itself, you can use your favorite whole bean coffee, ground coarsely as you would if using a French press, or Cafe Du Monde, which is a particular favorite of the Vietnamese. When I tried to buy one of the Vietnamese knock-offs of Cafe du Monde at a local Asian grocery and asked the cashier if it was the best, the cashier took the canister out of hand, disappeared down the aisle to the back of the store, and returned with Cafe du Monde. But, if you don’t like the licorice hint of chicory in your coffee, you may not like Cafe du Monde.

Vietnamese Coffee (Cà phê)
Serves 1

Ingredients
For black (đen) coffee:
1 rounded tbsp coffee, either Cafe Du Monde brand or your favorite beans ground as for a French press2 c almost-boiling water (1 c for pre-heating your glass; remainder for making the coffee)

Yogurt is an easy way of using up leftover sweetened condensed milk. In Vietnam, yogurt made with sweetened condensed milk is eaten as a dessert, often in two-ounce servings and with a teensy plastic spoon, the kind you might use to sample the ice cream at Izzy’s. It is sweet and rich; a little goes a long way. Even the six-ounce servings we made using an electric Euro Cuisine Yogurt Maker and skim milk were decadent enough to be considered a treat, rather than breakfast. Truong Thanh Grocery Store sells 12-packs of two-ounce plastic yogurt containers for $2. They also carry Vietnamese yogurt, frozen in a plastic bag in the freezer case next to the cash register, also for $2. You can use Truong Thanh’s yogurt as a starter, if you leave time for it to defrost, but we prefer to use six-ounce containers of plain yogurt, because then you use the yogurt container as your measuring cup (we like Cultural Revolution brand organic yogurt from Kalona, Iowa. It’s available at Whole Foods, Mississippi Market, Seward Co-op, and most other Minneapolis-St. Paul co-ops.) If you don’t have an electric yogurt maker, you can make your yogurt using the water-bath method.

We haven’t found a way to freeze our skim yogurt without it crystallizing, but still like it best in two-ounce portions.

I wanted to send my love to this blog simply because of the Cafe du Monde usage. New Orleans has a decent Vietnamese population and pairing the condensed milk with the rich flavor of Cafe du Monde is perfect!